


No Church in the Wild

by Bonymaloney



Series: Fighting It At Every Turn [1]
Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Consensual Violence, Dat spiral tho, F/M, Fantasizing, Masturbation, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:00:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22202239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bonymaloney/pseuds/Bonymaloney
Summary: All he knew was, when he looked at the Captain, it felt as though his heart wanted to fight her.
Relationships: The Captain/Maximillian DeSoto
Series: Fighting It At Every Turn [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1629799
Comments: 13
Kudos: 75





	1. Chapter 1

Max lost his virginity the day his team won the regional junior tossball semi-finals. The boy was his teammate, and Max couldn’t remember exactly how it had happened, but they had found a place to be alone together, drunk on victory and purpleberry liquor. Max had kissed the boy’s bruises and pressed new ones into his skin. They were both inexperienced, and their touches were clumsy, rough and tender. After he came, Max rubbed grass and mud into his lowers to hide the wet spot, and the other boy did the same. It didn’t look suspicious - if you came out of a tossball match clean, you hadn’t really been playing. 

At seminary, he’d learned to adopt the OSI view of sex as as a simple physical urge, like food and sleep. The proper amount to meet the body’s needs was Lawful, overindulgence was a sinful waste of more productive time. Marriage was a rational union between two interested parties. It was all oddly disappointing. He found people who were willing to sleep with him, but he couldn’t fuck the way he wanted to, because he didn’t want to hurt them - or at least, he knew he ought to not want to. The men and women that sought him out for his income and status disgusted him, those who wanted to marry him so they would have enough to eat inspired a horrified sort of pity. 

Meditation helped when he felt horny about as often as it helped with his violent impulses - a variable success rate. When he was drunk, he would sometimes admit to himself that he was lonely, but most of the time he simply told himself that there was no one good enough for him. He yearned without knowing it for that shared passion and joy in the moment, desperately grasping your pleasure and then freely giving it all away to your lover in the next breath. 

Max couldn’t possibly have articulated his feelings. All he knew was, when he looked at the Captain, it felt as though his heart wanted to fight her.

He was not introspective. His emotions were not reliable guides, and when he gave into them, chaos often reigned until he was done. The molecules that made up his body were the same as those that made up all other substances in the Universe, governed by the same Laws set in motion by the Architect when time began and destined to behave accordingly. Therefore he would do as well to focus his intellect on the Universe rather than inward upon himself. Max was a vessel for the Plan, and he had no more choice in the matter than ice had to form a lattice in the absence of heat. He wished for the absence of heat. 

Dispassionately considered, the arrival of the Captain was a clear sign from the Universe that he was destined to prevail. One condition of Max’s parole was that he reported his movements to his superiors in the OSI - the same worthless fucking functionaries who had taken his freedom and striped his back for daring to suggest that they take the fight to the Philosphists on their own ground. Unwilling to risk spiritual destruction for the glory of greater understanding; it was clear they had never played tossball. Aboard the Unreliable, his movements went unchecked. He had a small but comfortable cabin of his own; and unless the crew had need of his skills, he was free to carry out his studies without fear of censure _or_ interruption by the dead-eyed hordes of his congregation. Last time they had landed in Edgewater he’d heard a rumour that a Marauder was going around wearing Reed Tobson’s hat. Max had had to restrain himself from rushing outside the walls and gifting the miscreant every last bit he had on him. 

And yet, the Captain. 

She was in her cabin, sat one deck below him with her view of the stars. He knew she would be pouring over the scrawled journals and old issues of the Halcyon Observer, printed data from hacked terminals and mindless Dissident Hunter comics, with the same fervour he applied to his philosophical texts and calculations. The notion was oddly irritating. He was striving for nothing less than the solution to the Grand Equation, to make Scientism’s powerful truth undeniable. The name of Maximillian DeSoto would be forever underlined in the Plan, and what the Captain was doing with her time was irrelevant; but the idea distracted him nonetheless. 

Max decided to meditate; tired as he was, it might settle his mind. He cleared his desk and pulled out his favourite icon. The Fibonacci spiral, depicted in real print on real paper by a Scientician whose name had been lost to the centuries. A beautiful depiction of how infinite growth was possible as long as perfect stability was maintained; hidden by the Architect throughout the Universe as inexplicably subtle numbers and ratios, signs for those who truly believed. He traced the shape slowly outward, thinking of nothing but the smooth, cool feel of the paper, until he reached the edge of the page and his fingertips grazed across the scratched surface of the desk. 

That was the point of the spiral; it was infinite. Try as he might, he would never find the end. Max sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. Meditation was failing him, and he resolved instead to rest; to wake with his energy replenished to attack the day. He closed his books, lifted his robes from his shoulders and hung them carefully in their place. Rather than risk encountering any of the crew and having to deal with their tomfoolery, he decided to save his water ration for the morning and enjoy a double shift in the shower. Cleanliness was next to Lawfulness. 

Dimming the lights, he lay on his bunk clad in shorts and a soft, faded Hammers replica jersey that was older than some of his books. He closed his eyes, draping one forearm over his face to block out the running lights, and entirely failed to sleep. The bunk was smaller than the bed he was used to at the Mission, the rumbling of the engines was ever-present at the very base of his hearing, and his circadian rhythms were still those of Emerald Vale. 

He eventually fell into a fitful doze, listening to the sounds of the ship winding down around him. Dr Fenhill sharing a last smoke of the day with Millstone; Ms Holcombe sneaking considerately past his door in a fashion that was somehow noisier than if she’d walked normally. And finally, the Captain. He recognised her slouchy tread up the stairs, along the corridor, through the galley and then sliding back down the ladder to the engine room. Her nightly routine; a circadian rhythm of its own. 

Her steps were slouchy because her boots were a little too big. She’d taken them from the feet of a still warm corpse, a man she’d crossed off with a swing of her pistol after the useless thing misfired. A smooth strong arc; she moved like the Plan in action. And although she was clearly distressed at wearing a dead man’s clothes, she’d had no choice. Her own flimsy footwear - from the cryogenic chambers of the Hope, or so she claimed - was inadequate and the rough ground was hurting her. She’d taken a deep breath, pulled the boots on, then shrugged and never looked back. Max admired that so much, the ruthlessness, the rationality. 

And yet it was in the service of chaos. She not only believed that she lacked a purpose, but also that she might find one or more that suited her in the future. It was worse even than Philosophism: if everyone might pick and choose his own purpose it was hard to see how anything other than chaos could result. He was immune to such temptation, of course, but the dangerous simplicity of it might mislead the young and the naive. 

In the meantime she talked to every shopkeeper and low-down spacer, read everything she could get her hands on, ignored every lock. Max wasn’t above a little creative computing himself; but there was a time and a place, and that time was not when she was supposed to be earning the bits to fulfil her place in the Plan, which was to bring him to Monarch. Instead it seemed like they were fighting their way through every abandoned township and ruined laboratory they could find. And oh _stars_ , how she fought. 

The Captain was speed and grace, her limbs powerful, her blows crunching. She had grown up in a world where she was evolved to fit the air and the gravity and the food, and as a result she was a little taller than he was, with a strong, sleek body. She was a rare and beautiful specimen, a fitting vessel for the Plan, if only he could fill her. 

Max was more than half asleep, but he woke himself up enough to tilt his hips and slide his shorts down to his knees. He wrapped his hand around his erection, already swelling, and improved it with long, luxurious strokes. Precum was leaking out of him, and he licked his palm appreciatively before adding his saliva to the slickness. His cock was fat and stiff and ready. With his other hand he pinched and rolled his nipples between his rough fingertips, gently at first and then with sharp, vicious tugs. He drove himself just over the line from pleasure to pain, squeezed and pumped himself fast and rough. 

He imagined fighting her, the determined flash in her eyes, the delighted grin on her face. She was like him, for all she tried to deny it; proving herself worthy of survival thrilled her. And he imagined the wet heat of her cunt, forcing her up against a wall, holding her arms behind her so that her breasts pressed against hard steel as he fucked her. The sounds she would make as she begged him for more, the hard slap of his flesh against hers. 

He braced his feet against the mattress to thrust up into his fist, scraping the blunt nails of his free hand across the soft skin of his thighs and belly. And he imagined her charging him, his teeth clicking together with a flash behind his eyes. She would have him on the ground sore and winded, straddling him and pinning him and riding his shaft, biting harsh kisses into his skin as she took her pleasure. 

He shoved his hand into his mouth to muffle the groans that escaped him with every breath, and he imagined their limbs entangled, their bodies gleaming with sweat, her legs around his waist her burning fingers pushing into him dry as he rutted into her, his name on her lips, oh _fuck_ -

 _“Pearl,”_ he gasped as he came, the sound stifled as he bit down. Flushed with pleasure, he dazedly inspected his hand. It hurt when he flexed it, but the skin wasn’t broken. The marks wouldn't look suspicious - Max already had bruises on his knuckles, and some of them had been left by teeth. 

He lay enjoying his afterglow for as long as he could stand, until the sensation of the cooling mess on his stomach became too unpleasant to bear. Wiping at himself with his shorts and secreting them in his laundry crate made him feel rather sordid, but as he stretched back out again on his bunk the lovely relaxed heaviness in his limbs was more than worth it. 

Scientism did not condemn self-stimulation. Masturbation as a form of stress relief could be considered beneficial, if it lead to a more productive worker. The OSI even approved R-rated serials for the purpose, although Law help the poor sods who had to watch the stuff and vet it for subversion before it went out. Max knew that this had been something other, something more, and that misusing Doctrine to justify one's own ends was a grave sin. But, he reflected, he might as well be fined for a cysty as a sprat; and he knew that he would sleep well that night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This commission is by the awesome socksual-innuendo on tumblr! This is my second commission from them and it’s been a complete pleasure both times. I can never get enough of the way they draw the dad bod. 
> 
> Max is always so put together in the game, I love the idea of him looking messy and vulnerable, before he drags the energy together to go on with his angry quest.
> 
> Ask me about my tattoo headcanons ⚓️

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to FunkyPoacher, who helped me clarify my ideas about the status of the OSI on Earth and a bunch of stuff about Pearl before and after the Hope; and to Pali, who gave me a fantastic list of suggestions for how Max might refer to his butthole, none of which made it into the fic.


End file.
